Towards grounding computational linguistic approaches to readability: Modeling reader-text interaction for easy and difficult texts
Sowmya Vajjala, Detmar Meurers, Alexander Eitel, Katharina Scheiter
Abstract
Computational approaches to readability assessment are generally built and evaluated using gold standard corpora labeled by publishers or teachers rather than being grounded in observations about human performance. Considering that both the reading process and the outcome can be observed, there is an empirical wealth that could be used to ground computational analysis of text readability. This will also support explicit readability models connecting text complexity and the reader’s language proficiency to the reading process and outcomes. This paper takes a step in this direction by reporting on an experiment to study how the relation between text complexity and reader’s language proficiency affects the reading process and performance outcomes of readers after reading We modeled the reading process using three eye tracking variables: fixation count, average fixation count, and second pass reading duration. Our models for these variables explained 78.9%, 74% and 67.4% variance, respectively. Performance outcome was modeled through recall and comprehension questions, and these models explained 58.9% and 27.6% of the variance, respectively. While the online models give us a better understanding of the cognitive correlates of reading with text complexity and language proficiency, modeling of the offline measures can be particularly relevant for incorporating user aspects into readability models.- Anthology ID:
- W16-4105
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Linguistic Complexity (CL4LC)
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2016
- Address:
- Osaka, Japan
- Editors:
- Dominique Brunato, Felice Dell’Orletta, Giulia Venturi, Thomas François, Philippe Blache
- Venue:
- CL4LC
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee
- Note:
- Pages:
- 38–48
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/W16-4105
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Sowmya Vajjala, Detmar Meurers, Alexander Eitel, and Katharina Scheiter. 2016. Towards grounding computational linguistic approaches to readability: Modeling reader-text interaction for easy and difficult texts. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Linguistic Complexity (CL4LC), pages 38–48, Osaka, Japan. The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee.
- Cite (Informal):
- Towards grounding computational linguistic approaches to readability: Modeling reader-text interaction for easy and difficult texts (Vajjala et al., CL4LC 2016)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/dois-2013-emnlp/W16-4105.pdf